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bsolutely, because what Topic takes on is stuff
“A
that pleases me. I took on the stewardship of
Topic and I’m concerned not to drop the
bucket on it, to keep it ongoing and alive,
which means I’ve always been risk averse.
Something else we’re trying to do is make records that last for a
long time, for these records to be around, in a sense, for all of
time. That’s too big an aim, but it is an aim. But if I came to hear
a singer that so impressed me, and the other elements of the
organisation were right, then I would just have to do it because I
have made the company strong enough that we can afford to risk
it now. There are odd aspects to how that has happened, partly
from distribution and partly from selling the property. It was
always essential to me to make sure that we kept the company
viable. I’ve limited my adventure by not risking sinking.”
The 20-CD Voice Of The People series of hardcore traditional
British folk recordings, with more to come soon, might have
seemed more than a little risky to some. What was the thinking
there?
“The history of me at Topic has always been looking back and
saying ‘Oh, I wish I’d done that better’. I believed at the time I was
putting out whole albums by Cyril Poacher and Bob Hart and the
like that these were traditional singers and they weren’t best
served by being stuck in compilations. Well, that may have had
some validity, but what I’d failed to recognise was that it also
made it very hard, for people who weren’t absolutely locked into
that sort of music, for it to be accessible. So the demise of vinyl
enabled me to rethink. Having learned so much from being
involved in distribution, running Direct Distribution at that time, I
realised a lot more about how records worked, and so thought,
‘Actually the compilation is going to work much better here and
be much more entertaining. It’s going to achieve that goal of mak-
ing things available.’”
Some of those singers had a handful of really great songs.
When they went down to the pub on Saturday night, those
were the ones that everybody wanted to hear. So albums like
the fRoots-catalysed and Arts Council-funded Hidden English,
effectively the greatest hits of those singers doing all the
great songs, possibly pointed the way forward to The Voice Of
The People.
“At that time, working with Reg Hall, it was a good opportu-
nity to review everything that was available to us. Now, one of the
great regrets was that there was a whole tranche of material that
wasn’t available, that Peter Kennedy had recorded back in the ’50s
and thereabouts. Unfortunately I never managed to strike a good
relationship with Peter. To cut a long story short, after he died I
found out that the British Library was talking with the family
about what was going to happen with the archive and that there
was an economic aspect to it. This was a wonderful collection of
fantastic recordings of people who I loved, who’d been recorded
well, when they were younger, when they were in their prime.”
“Fortunately something that happened around that time was
that I had recognised that we weren’t going to need the crum-
bling property at 50 Stroud Green Road where we’d been based
for so long. We’d needed it for a long time because having our
own warehouse, initially living there, building a studio there – all
of those were working very well together, but once we’d stopped
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